There are more than 18,000 police departments in the United States, spread out in a vast jurisdictional patchwork of federal, state, local, and tribal agencies that stretches from Hawaii to Maine. This month, Alabama could add to their ranks something unprecedented in American history: a police department operated by a church.

In February, Briarwood Presbyterian Church asked the state legislature for legal authority to establish one. The Alabama state Senate approved Senate Bill 193, which would grant the church’s wish, earlier this month, and a House committee approved the measure on Wednesday. While it’s still several steps away from becoming law—the full chamber is expected to consider it next week—the legislation already, and predictably, faces opposition for blurring the lines between church and state.

The Alabama megachurch serves about 4,000 congregants between its two campuses outside Birmingham, which include a seminary and a K-12 school. About 2,000 students attend the school, and to protect them and worshippers, church officials say they need a police department of their own.

Briarwood declined multiple requests for an interview to discuss the bill. In an email, a church administrator provided documents laying out the institution’s rationale. Among the reasons it cited were recent, high-profile mass shootings nationwide, including those targeting schools. Other security measures can help reduce the threat, Briarwood acknowledged, but it argued that research showed the “number one line of defense” is a police presence.

“After the shooting at Sandy Hook and in the wake of similar assaults at churches and schools, Briarwood recognized the need to provide qualified first responders to coordinate with local law enforcement who so heroically and effectively serve their communities,” the church said in a press release in February. State Senator J.T. Waggoner, who drafted SB 193, told local newspapers that the church preferred to form its own police force instead of hiring a private security firm or using off-duty officers.

Church officials’ proposal has drawn strong criticism from groups that oppose the bill on constitutional grounds, including the American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Alabama. Randall Marshall, the organization’s acting executive director, called it an “unparalleled action” by the Alabama legislature.

“Our analysis is that this bill, if enacted and signed by the governor, would clearly violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment in vesting what is really a quintessentially government power—the police power—in the hands of a religious entity with essentially no oversight after that,” he told me.

Briarwood has indicated it doesn’t plan on adopting all the features of a law-enforcement system. In the provided documents, the church said it doesn’t plan to run a jail or a dispatch center, and will instead forge agreements with three other jurisdictions to handle those aspects of policing. Both Waggoner and the church have also repeatedly cited a provision in Alabama state law that allows universities and colleges to operate their own police departments.

Even with those limitations, the proposed department would still hold a broad array of powers typically held by local police forces. “It would grant to Briarwood Presbyterian Church the right to detain people, to arrest them, to use appropriate levels of force, including deadly force, to decide which laws to enforce, and which laws not to enforce,” Marshall said. Another problem he raised: The force would be answerable to church leaders, not the public.

A major constitutional issue that Briarwood could face is Supreme Court precedents requiring religious neutrality.

The bill itself is fairly straightforward. If enacted, it would allow the church’s board of trustees to “appoint and employ one or more persons to act as police officers to protect the safety and integrity of the church and its ministries.” Those officers would be “charged with all of the duties and invested with all of the powers of law-enforcement officers in this state.” Two other sections impose restraints: a standard requirement for officers to be certified by a state commission, and a provision restricting their authority to “the campuses and properties of Briarwood Presbyterian Church.”

As far as legislation goes, that’s pretty concise. But its constitutional implications are vast and apparently unprecedented. “I have been following this stuff for 20 years and can’t recall any other circumstance in which a church has asked for a police force that it can control,” said Robert Tuttle, a George Washington University law professor who specializes in relations between governments and faith-based organizations.

A major constitutional issue that Briarwood could face is Supreme Court precedents requiring religious neutrality—“that if you do establish a benefit, you don’t make it available to a single faith and then say, ‘Well, we’ll wait and see for the next application to come along,’” Tuttle said. He pointed to a 1994 Supreme Court case in which the justices struck down a New York law that carved out a special school district for members of a Hasidic Jewish sect. By singling out a specific church and imbuing it with the state’s policing powers, the law could face a similar challenge on those grounds.

Another influential precedent that could prove challenging for Briarwood, Tuttle noted, would be Larkin v. Grendel’s Den, a 1982 Supreme Court case. Central to the dispute was a Massachusetts law that allowed the governing bodies of churches and schools to block the issuance of liquor licenses within a 500-foot radius of their properties. The proprietors of Grendel’s Den, a bar and restaurant near Harvard University, sued the state on Establishment Clause grounds after a nearby Armenian church vetoed its license.

Unlike its namesake, the restaurant won handily. The justices ruled in an 8-1 decision that the statute “substantially breached” the metaphorical wall of separation between church and state set forth by the First Amendment. “The framers did not set up a system of government in which important, discretionary governmental powers would be delegated to or shared with religious institutions,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote for the high court.

Alabama’s bill would likely face a similar constitutional hurdle. In 1994, for example, the North Carolina Supreme Court relied on the Grendel’s Den precedent to abolish a campus police department at Campbell University, a private Christian university affiliated with the state’s Baptist convention. The state law authorizing the department’s creation amounted to an “excessive entanglement” between the government and a religious entity, the court ruled.

The debate over the Establishment Clause’s meaning is far from settled. Questions about the breadth and scope of religious liberty shaped recent Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage and the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, as well as lower-court battles about transgender rights and anti-discrimination laws. Conservatives frequently cited Justice Neil Gorsuch’s record of broad latitude toward religious-freedom claims as a reason to support his Senate confirmation.

But SB 193 still stands out amid those debates. Tuttle noted that the founders’ experience with the Church of England, which ran ecclesiastical courts and exercised a decree of policing power during their lifetimes, shaped their thinking when drafting the Establishment Clause.

“The interweaving of church and state in the exercise of coercive force was one of the rare things where you’d get agreement between the Congregationalists of New England and Madison and Jefferson in Virginia,” he told me, alluding to battles between the framers over provisions in the nation’s founding charter. “They all agreed that it was not the job of the government to turn over any of its coercive authorities to religious institutions.”

This article is part of our project “The Presence of Justice,” which is supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge.

Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

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